by Craig Nelson
Ethel Rosenberg publicly replied, “And what of our children, noble testament to our sacred union, fruit of our deep and enduring love; what manner of ‘mercy’ is it that would slay their adored father and deliver up their devoted mother to everlasting emptiness? Know then, you warped, gross eaters of dust, you abominations upon this beauteous earth, I should far rather embrace my husband in death than live on ingloriously upon your execrable bounty.”
In time, Venona would reveal 108 Soviet spies working within the United States and Great Britain. Meredith Gardner’s discovery of a November 1944 message listing the key scientists of Los Alamos was tracked to the nineteen-year-old Ted Hall, who was found to be now working with Ed Teller in Chicago. When the FBI interviewed him there, though, Hall revealed nothing. That night, he and his wife, Joan, “took all the left-wing stuff and packed it in boxes, and put it in the car, and put [our daughter] Ruthie into her snowsuit,” Joan remembered. “She was just, then, just over a year. Put her in her car seat and got in the car and drove to the bridge that crosses over the Chicago drainage canal. We dumped all the stuff into the canal. . . . [Ted] told me that he had done it because he was afraid that the United States might become ‘a very reactionary power’ after the war—those were his words—and that this would give the Soviet Union a better chance of standing up to them. . . . He certainly broke the law. He certainly broke his security oath. But he did not betray his country. He didn’t betray the people. Everything that he did was done because of his concern for the people. It was a humanitarian act. His motive was a humanitarian motive. Now, if you want to call that sort of thing treason, go right ahead.”
The FBI was never able to amass enough evidence to bring Ted Hall to trial. Instead, Harry Gold was sentenced to thirty years; David Greenglass to fifteen years; and the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death. President Eisenhower, wanting to show American fortitude in the morning hours of the Cold War, refused clemency.
Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary inmate Alger Hiss: “The June evening of the executions was calm and cloudless. We were all aware that . . . the executions had been scheduled for just before sunset. As the sun sank, silence spread over the recreation yard. Men stopped their games of baseball, boccie, handball, their exercises with weights, their trotting about the cinder track, their endless conversation. We sat or stood in an eerie quiet until after the sun had disappeared. . . . We felt we were honoring the very moments of death. . . . We had all been aware of the worldwide demonstrations and protests, which at those moments were proved to be futile. In all the months I spent at Lewisburg this occasion was unique—the inmates transcending their own unhappiness and self-involvement and joining in a mood of universal sadness at an act of inhumanity.”
Julius Rosenberg died in the electric chair at Sing Sing on June 19, 1953, at 8:06 p.m.; Ethel at 8:15.
In early 1950, North Korea’s Kim Il Sung told his ally Joseph Stalin that he was going to reunite the Koreas, that “the attack will be swift, and the war will be won in three days.” Stalin replied, “According to information coming from the United States . . . the prevailing mood is not to interfere.” As the American army was next door occupying Japan and as the skirmish reminded Pentagon chiefs of the early days of World War II, however, the United States immediately moved to defend its ally—unlike what Britain and France did for Poland—and made great advances into North Korean territory. At his first postintervention meeting with the Joint Chiefs, Truman asked for a study on the use of the Bomb if the Russians entered the conflict. Then in response to a request from Douglas MacArthur two weeks later, the Joint Chiefs decided that ten to twenty atomic bombs could be made available for his use, which the general thought could stop either the Russians or the Chinese from intervening: “I would cut them off in North Korea . . . I visualize a cul-de-sac. The only passages leading from Manchuria and Vladivostok have many tunnels and bridges. I see here a unique use for the atomic bomb—to strike a blocking blow—which would require a six months’ repair job. Sweeten up my B-29 force.” The Joint Chiefs, however, vetoed this strategy.
This moment was the start of the great debate in military and political circles that would continue for six decades: How, beyond the original demonstration of their power, could atomic bombs be used as weapons in war? A few months after America entered the conflict, Oppenheimer gave a speech to the National War College: “Are [atomic bombs] useful in ground combat? Are they useful in preventing the delivery of atomic bombs? What can we do with them? . . . It is a job that calls for a great deal of imagination to think what is the atom good for in war.” Then for the summer of 1953’s Foreign Affairs, he wrote “Atomic Weapons and American Policy,” which concluded, “The very least we can say is that, looking ten years ahead, it is likely to be small comfort that the Soviet Union is four years behind us, and small comfort that they are only about half as big as we are. The very least we can conclude is that our twenty-thousandth bomb, useful as it may be in filling the vast munitions pipelines of a great war, will not in any deep strategic sense offset their two-thousandth.” Hearing this, physicist John Wheeler complained to a congressman, “Anybody who says twenty thousand weapons are no better than two thousand ought to read the history of wars.” Sharing Wheeler’s perspective was Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, who announced in 1950, “If you say why not bomb them tomorrow, I say why not today? If you say today at five o’clock, I say why not one o’clock?” Von Neumann’s promotion of a preemptory nuclear strike was one of the many oddities that inspired Einstein to nickname his Princeton colleague Denktier, “think animal.”
Washington military and civilian policymakers during the Cold War would be baffled by the conundrum of “What is the atom good for in war?”—to the point of making them angry and confused. This cognitive dissonance, this inscrutable puzzle, was demonstrated in full force by the president of the United States when, after Mao bolstered North Korea with Chinese troops in the autumn of 1950, Truman threatened nuclear retaliation at a notorious November 30 news conference:
THE PRESIDENT: We will take whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation, just as we always have.
QUESTION: Will that include the atomic bomb?
THE PRESIDENT: That includes every weapon that we have.
QUESTION: Mr. President, you said “every weapon that we have.” Does that mean that there is active consideration of the use of the atomic bomb?
THE PRESIDENT: There has always been active consideration of its use. I don’t want to see it used. It is a terrible weapon, and it should not be used on innocent men, women, and children who have nothing whatever to do with this military aggression. That happens when it is used.
In December, MacArthur again requested permission to employ at his discretion twenty-six atomic bombs in a strategy he insisted would end the war in ten days, explaining later, “I would have dropped thirty or so atomic bombs . . . strung across the neck of Manchuria [and] spread behind us—from the Sea of Japan to the Yellow Sea—a belt of radioactive cobalt. . . . It has an active life of between 60 and 120 years. For at least 60 years there could have been no land invasion of Korea from the North. . . . My plan was a cinch.” The Joint Chiefs again said no. After Truman replaced MacArthur with Matthew Ridgway, the JCS also turned down Ridgway’s December 24, 1951, request for thirty-eight atomic bombs, though one historian’s theory as to why MacArthur was removed (a theory as yet unproved, as the sixty-year-old documents are still classified) is that Truman wanted a less volatile commander in the field in case nuclear weapons were in fact unleashed.
Even after 36,568 Americans, about 600,000 Chinese, and 2 million Koreans died during the three-year Korean War, the conflict could not be resolved into victory and defeat, as both sides were nuclear armed. Instead, it fizzled out in stalemate. For a brief part of the struggle, Soviet and American fighters had a couple of dogfights, and this is the full extent that the two nations would directly battle each other over the entire history of the Cold War. Contrary t
o what everyone believed in Washington during those three years, Nikita Khrushchev later admitted, “America had a powerful air force and, most important, America had atomic bombs, while we had only just developed the mechanism and had a negligible number of finished bombs. Under Stalin we had no means of delivery. . . . This situation weighed heavily on Stalin. He understood that he had to be careful not to be dragged into a war.”
Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953, led to renewed negotiations to end the conflict, but when these bogged down in August, President Eisenhower decided a theatrical reminder of LeMay’s nuclear strike force might move things forward, so when his boys landed at Okinawa, LeMay called a press conference just to make sure everyone knew exactly what was standing by. Lieutenant General James Edmundson: “Our mission called for me to take twenty B-36s with nuclear weapons on board and go to Okinawa and sit on the alert. The B-36 really wasn’t much fun to fly. It’s a gigantic thing. It’s like—they used to say it was like sitting on your front porch and flying your house around. . . . We stayed at Kadena and sat on the alert, crews at the airplanes, while the hostility-cessation papers were being signed. And the B-36s being there, with atomic weapons and ready to go, was a warning to the North Koreans and the Russians and the Chinese not to try anything funny when we were sitting around the peace table.” After his men came home to the United States, though, General LeMay never returned his bombs to the Atomic Energy Commission, as he was required to do, and this would not be the last of LeMay’s nose-thumbing of civilian oversight.
During the Korean War, the AEC grew from eight sites with 55,000 employees to twenty with 142,000. While running the country during this vast and nonsensical expansion, Harry Truman said, “The war of the future would be one in which man could extinguish millions of lives at one blow, demolish the great cities of the world, wipe out the cultural achievements of the past—and destroy the very structure of a civilization that has been slowly and painfully built up through hundreds of generations. Such a war is not a possible policy for rational men.” Variations on this two-faced strategy would be heard in speeches from leaders of both the United States and the USSR over the decades to come, while at the same time both would always find new reasons to be belligerent, and afraid. Sergei Khrushchev: “When America elected General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a hero of the Second World War, as president in November 1952, we had no doubt what it meant: The USA has decided to fight, otherwise, why would they need a general?”
10
A Totally Different Scheme, and It Will Change the Course of History
IN the first years after Truman approved going forward with the Super, Edward Teller made absolutely no progress. Physicist Lee DuBridge said that at meetings of the Atomic Energy Commission’s General Advisory Committee “every time he reported, we thought he’d taken a step backwards.” Finally Enrico Fermi returned to Los Alamos to help. Some explained his reversal in opinion as that, since Truman had given the go-ahead, Fermi thought he should contribute, while others said he was there to prove that hydrogen bombs would never work, even to the point of saying to Teller directly that he hoped they would fail. But perhaps since Enrico had originally given the idea of thermonuclear to Teller so many years before, he wanted to wrestle with the scientific puzzle and see how it all turned out.
Instead of actual lab work producing physical, measurable results, the fusion group was forced to calculate phenomena arising from the intersection of fission and fusion, including how an immense cascade of neutrons would behave (neutronics); where the heat would go and what it would do (thermodynamics); and the effect of particles and radiation released in the fluid flow of explosion (hydrodynamics). What was needed for thermonuclear’s immense calculations of all these forces, combined with the complicated interactions when they were arrayed against each other, were counting machines. A group around Dick Feynman had tried working with IBM punch-card units, but the hardware just wasn’t powerful enough. Instead, most of the work began with raw human labor. Physicist Richard Garwin: “The computers of [Polish mathematician Stanislaw] Ulam and Fermi in those days were young women, who would come in the morning to present the results of the previous day’s run. The run was the use of Marchant mechanical calculators, to fill in successive boxes on a spreadsheet, where various differential equations had been reduced to first-order differential equations, so there was only adding, subtracting, and multiplying, as one crawled one’s way across the spreadsheet.”
One night in 1945, John von Neumann admitted to his dear wife, Klari, “What we are creating now is a monster whose influence is going to change history, provided there is any history left. Yet it would be impossible not to see it through.” The mathematician was not speaking of hydrogen bombs, but of computers. During the first meeting of von Neumann with Herman Goldstine, one of the engineers at the University of Pennsylvania who had created the best computing machine at the time, Goldstine recalled, “When it became clear to von Neumann that I was concerned with the development of an electronic computer capable of 333 multiplications per second, the whole atmosphere of our conversation changed from one of relaxed good humor to one more like the oral examination for the doctor’s degree in mathematics. Soon thereafter the two of us went to Philadelphia so that von Neumann could see the ENIAC. . . . The story used to be told about him at Princeton that while he was indeed a demigod, he had made a detailed study of humans and could imitate them perfectly. Actually he had great social presence, a very warm, human personality, and a wonderful sense of humor.”
When the ENIAC proved erratic and too weak for the calculations the Super required, von Neumann expanded on the ideas of British mathematician Alan Turing to create a more powerful calculating machine that used binary code for both its content and its programming—wife Klari wrote the code—with memory provided by oscilloscope tubes. He called it the Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer—MANIAC. As he and Princeton did not patent the design, MANIAC became the original open source—it was copied by universities across the United States and is still the foundation of modern computer architecture. Besides calculating the contrary effects of fission on fusion to create the most enormous weapon in human history, MANIAC was also used to forecast the weather.
Before von Neumann could wield his MANIAC, Teller, Ulam, and Russian physicist George Gamow were regularly meeting to brainstorm and search for solutions. Stan Ulam: “Both Gamow and I showed a lot of independence of thought in our meetings, and Teller did not like this very much. . . . I wrote [Gamow], prophetically it seems, that great troubles would follow because of Edward’s obstinacy, his single-mindedness and his overwhelming ambition.” Teller, in turn, said that Ulam “originally came with my friend Johnny von Neumann’s recommendation, but I found him difficult company. He seemed to think very highly of himself and expended much effort in demonstrating his cleverness (which was strange because his ingenuity was obvious). Although we had limited contact with each other during the war and postwar, I developed an allergy to him. His demeanor made it clear that his feeling about me was even stronger.”
The universally acclaimed von Neumann told Françoise, Stan’s wife, that he’d never met anyone so self-confident as her husband, “adding that perhaps it was somewhat justified.” For one example, Ulam had noticed that he could predict the outcome of a solitaire card game by noting what happened in the first plays, instead of having to memorize every possible outcome. He and von Neumann developed the details into a form of statistics called the Monte Carlo method, and these mathematical principles of probability would produce insights into the calculations of fission-induced fusion and help create the hydrogen bomb.
In June 1950, following von Neumann’s suggestion, Ulam was able to use ENIAC to test Teller’s original math. He proved that the 1946 calculations that were the Super’s basis, Teller’s claim to genius, were all wrong, and von Neumann, one of Teller’s lifelong friends and most ardent supporters, used his own computer prototype at Princeton to confirm Ulam’s numbe
rs. The handsome mathematician had undone the brooding physicist, and Teller felt his life work collapse. Stan’s wife, Françoise: “I was well placed to watch how personally Teller took the fact that Stan and [Wisconsin mathematician C. J.] Everett were the first to blow the whistle with their crude calculations. Every day Stan would come into the office, look at our computations, and come back with new ‘guesstimates,’ while Teller objected loudly and cajoled everyone around into disbelieving the results. What should have been the common examination of difficult problems became an unpleasant confrontation.” Hans Bethe: “Nobody will blame Teller because the calculations of 1946 were wrong, especially because adequate computing machines were not then available. But he was blamed at Los Alamos for leading the laboratory, and indeed the whole country, into an adventurous program on the basis of calculations which he himself must have known to have been very incomplete.”
Then, in a story as old as myth itself, Teller’s great foe became his savior. Françoise Ulam: “Engraved on my memory is the day when I found [Stan] at noon staring intensely out of a window in our living room with a very strange expression on his face. He said, ‘I found a way to make it work.’ ‘What work?’ I asked. ‘The Super,’ he replied. ‘It’s a totally different scheme, and it will change the course of history.’ ” Françoise, who “had rejoiced that the ‘Super’ had not seemed feasible,” was “appalled by this news.”
Inspired by von Neumann’s Fat Man ordnance lenses, Ulam’s idea was to implode a fission shell into a fusion core, compressing and igniting it, creating a real Super bomb magnitudes larger than Teller’s Alarm Clock or Sakharov’s Layer Cake. Ed Teller: “[Ulam’s] suggestion was far from original; compression has been suggested by various people on innumerable occasions in the past. But this was the first time that I did not object to it.” Ulam thought neutrons would be the key force, but Teller insisted X-ray radiation would symmetrically compress the inner layers of tritium, deuterium, plutonium, and uranium and be the answer.